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“La mar es una puta” Beside the landing, a driftwood cross refuses to age. The tide is moving in. A sheet of fiddler crabs wrinkles and sags, unfolds and folds across the sand. The water boils with herring fry, a city’s worth of wishes, tossed dimes. Seagulls drop, spreading like napkins. A woman collecting conchs and whelks in a white bucket maroons herself on a bar. Her husband, a volunteer for the state, pulls down his mask: “I told you so,” he yells, before he wades to help her in. He’s been belt-sanding “some dirty words in Spanish” from the pavilion eaves. A half a century ago, sloops, schooners anchored this horizon. Cuban spongers in dinghies drifted out of this shallow cove with the tide, the orange sun melting into white breakers before them, sky inflamed, inflamed. 44 ...

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